Between Threat and Hope. Migration to the New World. Mary Antin’s Account

Source Description

In 1894
Mary Antin (born
Maryasche Antin) from the Belarusian town of Polotzk, her mother
and three siblings traveled via Hamburg to
Boston,
her father already having gone ahead. Immediately after her arrival in 1894, Mary Antin gave an account of her voyage in a letter to her
maternal uncle, Moshe Hayyim Weltman in
Polotzk.
According to the history of this letter as told by Mary Antin herself, her
lamp tipped over shortly before she had finished the letter. Since kerosene
had been spilled all over it, she had to write a new copy. In 1899 she published an English version of the account
originally written in Yiddish based on the kerosene-doused original titled
From Plotzk to Boston.
The English version written when she was 18 was intended for the American
public and differed noticeably in style from the letter written in Yiddish
to her uncle and relatives back home in Russia when she was
thirteen, which is the document discussed here. Literarily gifted Mary Antin was
considered a child prodigy, and the publication funded by Jewish patrons was
supposed to enable her further education. Mary Antin was supported
by her teacher, Mary
Dillingham, Boston Jewish
philanthropists
Lina and Jacob
Hecht, and their friend, the well-known Jewish
writer
Israel Zangwill.
The latter established contact with the journal American Hebrew, which
printed the English version in serial form in 1899
before it was published as a book. In light of increasing xenophobia and
political campaigns against mass immigration to the U. S., Antin’s patrons sought
to present an exemplar of integration benefitting the country. In 1910
Mary Antin got
hold of the original letter while on a visit to Russia. In 1914 her brother-in-law, John
F. Grabau, had the letter bound and donated it to the
Boston Public
Library, where it is still located today, along with an
introduction to the history of the manuscript written in English by
Mary Antin.

The original manuscript is 68 pages long; due to an error, its
pagination jumps from page 55 to page 60. This source interpretation is
based on a transcript and English
translation of the letter published in 2013 by Sunny Yudkoff.

The account’s narrative planes

On the factual level, Mary
Antin describes her experience of disinfection in great detail.
Her account includes numerous details about the setting, procedures, routines,
and actions. She uses the pronoun “we” or the more general “one,” thus letting
herself and her relatives dissolve into the group of migrants. Her letter
illustrates how individuals became an anonymous mass, how disoriented they were,
and how they had no choice but to be subjected to the facility’s staff and
procedures once they had embarked on the journey. They virtually became
“prisoners” of institutions and procedures they could neither foresee,
comprehend, nor influence. A second narrative plane of reflection and experience
describing Mary’s
thoughts and feelings and showing an attempt on her part to categorize and
understand her experience in the first person is merely hinted at in this
letter. She remains largely inarticulate on this level. Four
years later, in the English version, she put more emphasis on her own
perception, emotions, and thoughts. Therefore the original Yiddish text is all
the more powerful in documenting the immediacy of her experience and her need to
give an exact account of the incomprehensible, the overwhelming, and the shared
experience of powerlessness.

The success story of Mary
Antin’s account

The excerpt presented here, which describes the disinfection in Ruhleben, became
well-known through the more reflective and more emotionally charged English
version of 1899 because Mary Antin reused literal
quotes from this version of the letter in her 1912
autobiography titled “The Promised Land.” The
book was a great success, it went through several editions and was translated into German as early as 1913. In it Mary Antin describes her American assimilation and her ascent
into the educated middle class as a success story. In the United States, her
striving for complete assimilation was initially seen as exemplary for her
generation of immigrants. Reviewers praised what was typical in her account, her
“collective voice.” “The Promised Land” became
required reading in schools, excerpts from it were printed in textbooks and
discussed in citizenship class.

Mass emigration to the “New World”

The sanitary measures described in this document were a consequence of mass
migration from eastern
Europe. Between the 1880s and the First World War, numerous
non-Jewish migrants and roughly two million Jewish migrants left the Russian Empire,
Austria-Hungary, and Romania. Demographic
and economic developments, legal restrictions, and the devastating poverty among
the Jewish population resulting from it were the main reasons for mass
emigration from the Tsarist
Empire, which had already begun in the 1840s. Many others also left Europe in large numbers
at the time in order to seek their fortune in the New World. They all
traveled by train to the major seaports, just like Mary Antin and her family
did.

Increasingly strict checks of emigrants

In 1892 a cholera epidemic caused by the consumption of
unfiltered water from the Elbe river claimed 8,000 lives in Hamburg – and
Russian-Jewish emigrants were blamed for it. The quick finger-pointing resulted
from the widely held belief that transiting emigrants from “the East” were
suspicious carriers of “Asian” viruses. Cholera, typhus, and the eye infection
trachoma, which is spread by bacteria, were perceived as threats to European
civilization. At the same time the United States
introduced more restrictive immigration rules. Individuals who were sick or
disabled were no longer admitted into the country. Migrants not only had to
spend several weeks quarantined in Hamburg, but also in
the immigration facility at Ellis island outside of New York, which was
opened in 1892. Due to the cholera epidemic, Hamburg’s port was
closed down temporarily, and in September
U. S.
authorities halted transatlantic migration from all European seaports for
several months. This resulted in significant losses for the shipping companies.
In order to prevent repatriations at their own cost, the shipping companies
HAPAG and Norddeutscher LloydNorth German Lloyd
in 1894 / 95 began to
establish checkpoints at the borders with Russia and Austria where they had
migrants undergo a precautionary health examination according to U. S. immigration
rules. These checkpoints were modeled on the facility described by Mary Antin. It was located
in Ruhleben near
Berlin and
had been established by the Prussian authorities in 1893. From
there Mary Antin and
her family continued their journey to Hamburg, where, upon
arrival at the train station, emigrants were put on horse carriages taking them
to a dockside barracks camp. They were interned there for eight days and
received basic yet kosher
provisions until their ship’s departure. Both the emigrants’ train station at
Ruhleben,
built before the disinfection facility in 1891, and the
barracks complex built at Hamburg’s America dockAmerikaquai in 1892 were meant specifically to keep emigrants from the
Russian
empire out of Berlin’s and Hamburg’s city centers.
In 1902
HAPAG replaced the dockside barracks with modern emigration
facilities at the port’s periphery.

The disinfection procedure from the perspective of the migrants

In the 1890s scientific racism
reinforced “stereotypes according to which eastern Europeans lived in dirt and
squalor and were dressed in unwashed, bug-infested rags.”Paul Weindling,
Ansteckungsherde. Deutsche Bakteriologie 1890-1920, in: Philipp Sarrasin
et al. (eds.), Bakteriologie und Politik, Frankfurt am Main 2007, p.
366. In the manner of their execution, the health exams at
times exceeded what was medically required. In this context, the perspective of
the migrants themselves is important. It was “instilled in them early on to
expect health exams and disinfection.”Ibid., p. 368.Mary Antin’s letter
illustrates the impression this kind of treatment made on the migrants: “And I shuddered at the memory of how everyone had been
treated (in the bath): The harsh faces of all the people whom we had seen in
the Berlin
baths – or better said, prison – with their white clothes. They made a
terrible impression on everyone. Their orders, their rushing and yelling
made everyone shudder.” (p. 29).Mary Antin’s letter
containing this account of her experience also documents how this information
found its way to potential emigrants eager for information. This knowledge was
passed on through hundreds of thousands of letters written by emigrants that
were read by entire networks: Mary Antin wrote that her original account had been returned to
her by a relative in Vilna after it had been passed around among a circle of
relatives and acquaintances in Polotzk and other
branches of the family further afield in the Russian Empire.

The historiographical reassessment of the disinfection procedure

After 1945 the description of the disinfection procedure
began to be interpreted differently. The above-mentioned passage was repeatedly
quoted in historical writing, where it was described as “unsettling,”Tobias Brinkmann, Why Paul
Nathan Attacked Albert Ballin: The Transatlantic Mass Migration and the
Privatization of Prussia's Eastern Border Inspection, 1886-1914, Central
European History 43 (2010) 1, p. 59, fn. 19. “hauntingly
familiar,”Jolie
Sheffer, Recollecting, Repeating, and Walking Through: Immigration,
Trauma, and Space in Mary Antin's The Promised Land, in: MELUS 35 (2010) 1, pp.
141-166, esp. p. 150. or “a ghastly foreshadowing.”“eine gespenstische
Vorahnung,”Robert Jan Van
Pelt / Debórah Dwork, Auschwitz: von 1270 bis heute, Zurich 1998, p.
55. Now the account was reminiscent of images resembling
in every detail scenes known from descriptions of the Holocaust: human beings
treated like livestock, overcrowded train cars stopping in the middle of
nowhere, the rushing, uniformed personnel shouting orders, the undressing, the
communal shower room, the heaps of clothing and (in the English version) the
agonies suffered. The images evoked by the text seemed to foreshadow future
events. Michael André
Bernstein’s concept of “backshadowing”Michael André Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions. Against Apocalyptic History,
Berkeley 1994, p. 16. examines this anachronistic logic. Retroactive
overshadowing by our knowledge of later events impedes an unprejudiced
interpretation of this source. It is only from today’s perspective that such
scenes generate unease. Until the Shoah the scientifically proven connection
between disease, bacteria, and parasites had made it a regular practice to
subject migrants to collective disinfection and delousing. By reinforcing ideas
and norms rendering certain procedures “normal,” such social practices in the
treatment of “poverty migrants” from “the East” gained a long-term effect,
however: “We migrants were herded at the stations, packed in the cars, and
driven from place to place like cattle.”Mary Antin, The
Promised Land, Boston / New York 1912, p. 172. The National
Socialists’ disguise for their murderous population policy took advantage of
this “normality” and the common knowledge about the dangers from “the East” by
updating it for interactions between Germans and Jews. The sanitary measures
served as a narrative framework to deceive both Jewish victims and the German
population about the regime’s murderous character. Jews were first deported and
then, supposedly, treated according to the usual procedure for migrants. Thus
there actually is a connection to the Shoah that is not based on anachronistic
knowledge but on an interpretation of Mary Antin’s letter in its
contemporary context: in the course of Jewish mass migration from eastern Europe via
Hamburg to
the United
States, practices evolved and norms were created that shaped the
ideas of Jews and non-Jews, of victims and perpetrators as well as eyewitnesses
well into the Holocaust.

Contemporary references to Mary
Antin’s account

To this day, uniformed personnel wearing gloves and protective masks are part of
the iconography of migration at Europe’s periphery, for
example when it comes to dealing with exhausted refugees arriving in boats at
Lampedusa.
In the context of refugees, the image of the mask “superimposes territorial
borders on the boundaries of the body; migration here appears as an assault on
the integrity of one’s own body.”Francesca Falk, Europa
– der Blick auf die Ränder. Bootsflüchtlinge und Bildgedächtnis: Ikonen
gefährdeter Grenzen, in: Benjamin Drechsel et al. (eds.), Bilder von Europa.
Innen- und Außenansichten von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, Bielefeld 2010,
pp. 333-341, here: p. 338. As in Mary Antin’s time, migrants
today are at the mercy of nontransparent systems of traffickers, organizations,
and refugee camps.

Selected English Titles

Mary Antin, From Plotzk Due to a copyediting error, the name of the Belorusian
town of Polotzk was changed to that of the Polish town of Plotzk.
to Boston. With a Foreword by Israel Zangwill, Boston 21899.Mary Antin, The Promised Land, Boston et al.
1912.Tobias Brinkmann, Why Paul Nathan Attacked Albert
Ballin: The Transatlantic Mass Migration and the Privatization of Prussia's
Eastern Border Inspection, 1886-1914, in: Central European History 43 (2010)
1, pp. 47-83.Richard Evans, Death in Hamburg. Society and Politics
in the Cholera Years, 1830–1910, Oxford 1987.Michael P. Kramer, Assimilation in The Promised
Land: Mary Antin & the Jewish Origins of the American Self, in:
Prooftexts 18 (1998) 2, pp. 121-148.Werner Sollors, Introduction, in: Werner Sollors
(ed.), Mary Antin, The Promised Land, New York 1997.Sunny Yudkoff, The Adolescent Self-Fashioning of
Mary Antin, in: Studies in American Jewish Literature 32 (2013) 1, pp.
4-35.Sunny Yudkoff, Transcription of Mary Antin’s
Yiddish Letter (Precursor to From Plotzk to Boston), in: Studies in American
Jewish Literature 32 (2013) 1, pp. 67-98.Sunny Yudkoff, Translation of Mary Antin’s Yiddish
Letter (Precursor to From Plotzk to Boston), in: Studies in American Jewish
Literature 32 (2013) 1, pp. 36-66.Magdalena J. Zaborowska, How We Found America.
Reading Gender Through East-European Immigrant Narratives, Chapel Hill
1995

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About the Author

Monica Rüthers, Prof. Dr. phil., born 1963, is professor of Eastern European History at the University of Hamburg. Among her research interests are: socialist visual culture, socialist spaces, childhood in late socialism and Jewish and Gypsy spaces in the cultural topography of Europe.

This text is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution - Non commercial - No Derivatives 4.0 International License. As long as the work is unedited and you give appropriate credit according to the Recommended Citation, you may reuse and redistribute the material in any medium or format for non-commercial purposes.